Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World

kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go." In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Comments

ROS drivers

[QuantumG]

http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect_node

With the calibration the accuracy of Kinect is much improved.. and ROS has algorithms that can do this automatically for anyone lucky enough to have a manipulator - speaking of which, when is Microsoft coming out with a $150 robotic arm? :)

Re:ROS drivers

[Missing.Matter]

While the work the MIT student did is noteworthy, it's really quite trivial thanks to ROS. I do robotics research using ROS, and SLAM, navigation, planning, etc. are all handled by ROS automatically as long as you provide the appropriate data streams. It's really as simple as plugging in a device. Even the gesture recognition is handled by the kinect driver and issuing commands from gestures is trivial at that point.

I think the real recognition should be given to the group at CCNY (no I don't got school there) who did the work of getting the kinect driver working in ROS in the first place, and aren't even mentioned in this article.

Google

[supertrinko]

Google BotView. Little robots roaming the world making 3d models of everything.

Less ad money?

[TheLink]

Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen,

That could be bad for those who are getting TV ad money.

When advertisers can actually measure the number of people walking out and ignoring the ads, they often start paying less for ads :).

Re:Less ad money?

[wvmarle]

The next thing you know is some DRM in your TV that disables the mute function during ads :)

Re:Less ad money?

[DeionXxX]

This is true for all analog -> digital advertising. Digital advertising is so enticing to brands because they can MEASURE how their ads are actually doing. Are people looking at my ad? Are they interacting with it? How long? Are then then going to my site? Are they buying something? Are they coming back later? Did they invite someone else? Did those people come to our site? Did they buy something? On and on and on...

Those are all questions we can answer now with digital advertising. You couldn't do that with "analog" ads in print, on TV or Radio.

So at first companies stopped spending as much, then they realized that their normal ads didn't work, but soon, they started spending much more money on digital because they could maximize their returns now.

So in this case, advertisers might start buying less ads if they see that people are ignoring them and leaving the room. However, advertisers will soon figure out what works and we'll have ads that are better tailored for the experience and will make people actually watch / interact with them. This happened with TV ads too... once DVR's became popular, advertisers created ads just for DVR's.

Re:Less ad money?

[GNious]

Thankfully Disney has prior art on this, with ads on DVDs that cannot be skipped

Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit?

[rsborg]

In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Seriously, this is the first thing I thought when I read aboutthe Kinect. Here is a box, wired to the internet, with a hundred little beams that can not only tell what you're doing, what the room looks like to absurd levels of detail. Talk about 1984-style, in-soviet-russia type monitoring.

Forget the advertisers, with enough of these things deployed the feds won't need those vans parked outside your house, they'll grab the data in real-time from either the ISP or Mircrosoft.

Re:Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit?

[paganizer]

The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.

I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.

But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.

Feature Request #42:

[pinkushun]

Hand gesture to "make me a sandwich". Wait iRobot says No? Okay, gesture "sudo make me a sandwich" :-)

How nice...

[GF678]

An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.

vs.

A Microsoft rep talks about how Kinetic can be used to foster yet more advertising on people ...

Interesting difference in the application of advanced technology.